Thursday 5 January 2012 07.23 EST
First published on Thursday 5 January 2012 07.23 EST

Shockheaded Peter

The creations of Improbable theatre’s Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, these puppets dominated the human actors in the superb 1998 imagining of Heinrich Hoffmann’s cautionary tales. To the accompaniment of Martyn Jacques’s eerie falsetto, Harriet, who played with matches, disappeared into the froth of her flame-coloured petticoats, and a boy who sucked his thumb watched streams of blood-red ribbon being pulled from the stumps of his hands. Struwwelpeter himself got everywhere: his long fingernails scraped through the floorboards; his round head goggled above the proscenium arch

Sooty

A benign creature in an often spooky genre, Sooty acquired his name when his ears were darkened with soot so they would stand out on black-and-white television. He is known for having a magic wand and a water pistol, for being mute but casting a spell when he says: “Izzy wizzy let’s get busy”, and for playing the xylophone. A staple of children’s TV in the 50s, his domestic arrangements were weird: he shared a house with Sweep the dog (who looked lugubrious and squeaked), Soo (who sounded like a 40s radio announcer) and Harry Corbett’s disembodied head

Bernard Shaw

In 1949 Bernard Shaw put himself onstage as a puppet, sparring with a puppet Shakespeare in
Shakes versus Shav, written for the Lanchester Marionette theatre. The notion of carved actors excited Shaw to ironic effusion. He had, he said, learned his craft from these wooden creatures, whose “unvarying intensity of facial expression, impossible for living actors, keeps the imagination of the spectators continuously stimulated”. He admired puppets for not upstaging each other, and their stoicism was remarkable: “They can survive treatment that would kill live actors”

Lady Penelope

Puppetry’s posh totty was the creation of Sylvia Anderson, who also supplied her with a voice of husky command. Lady P, the London agent of International Rescue, was celebrated for her blond bob, her pink Rolls-Royce (she has a wedding car-hire company named after her) and her manservant, Parker, who in a former life had been an ace safe-cracker. She communicated secretly through a radio in her teapot. When episodes of
Thunderbirds were rebroadcast in 2001, the BBC was attacked for not editing out the scenes in which smoking featured. Lady P was rarely seen without a fag

Punch

Hook-nosed, hunchbacked, furious and garish, the seaside tyrant took his name and some of his nastiness from the Pulcinella of the Commedia dell’arte. His squawking voice is produced by a swazzle (a squeaker) in the mouth of the showman. He is played by the right hand of the puppeteer; all the other characters in the striped canvas booth go on the left hand: these include the beaten wife, Judy, originally called Joan, the chucked-around baby and a policeman. A live dog called Toby traditionally sits on the ledge of the booth. A string of sausages plays a vital role

The Sultan’s Elephant

This beautiful creation of the French company Royale de Luxe ambled through London, Antwerp, Calais and Le Havre in 2006. The beast was heavier than Nelson’s Column and taller than Admiralty Arch; its ears, which dangled like tropical leaves, were made from 900sq ft of leather. Yet it was graceful and had an amiable, wrinkled face. Powered by diesel motors, it carried within it a company of Lilliputian actors, commanded the streets with its waving trunk, spouted water over monuments and, for the enormous crowds who followed, changed for ever street theatre and their idea of the city

The Night Flyer

A boy bicycles across landscapes and skyscapes, racing against a speeding train, seeking to rescue his abducted sister. He is the creation of the ingenious Paper Cinema, which uses cutout paper puppets and cinema projection to make silent movies as the audience watches. Vivid figures, drawn in black and white, bob wordlessly to live music: the company began by providing illustrations for bands. These shows, which include a version of the Odyssey, owe something to the rich tradition of far eastern shadow puppetry but they look homespun. All are delicate without succumbing to the puppeteer’s curse: sweet dolefulness

Venus

Seven years ago the RSC’s Gregory Doran, inspired by the Bunraku puppet theatre of Japan, directed an exquisite version of
Venus and Adonis at the Little Angel theatre in Islington, north London. Nuzzling leather horses galloped through the audience; a hare hopped from stage to stalls; at the end the figure of Death draped itself around all the action. But the show’s star was Venus, a Marilyn Monroe of puppets who, with an impressive cleavage, neatly turned ankles and long golden locks, slipped across the stage like silk. She was sultry and bossy, the temporary queen of the theatre known as the home of British puppetry

Horsehead

This sad pantomime horse was the doomed hero of a 2005 show. A series of grisly episodes culminated in his skull being invaded by maggots, whose tiny feet could be heard stampeding towards their meal. Elsewhere, in what must surely be a puppet first, a character was seen, diarrhoea-stricken, on the lavatory. From 1987 until it disbanded last year, the company Faulty Optic delivered macabre stories using leather puppets, live video, pre-recorded film and scrap sculpture.
Snuffhouse Dusthouse featured pickled talking heads and a half-human, half-sack creature called Mabel. One of the stars of
Soiled was a sparrow with Tourettes

War Horse

This equine hero and his friends turned puppets into West End stars. For the National Theatre’s heart-stopping adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s first world war story, the South African Handspring Puppet Company used cane, bicycle brake cable and gauze to make enormous, expressive creatures, moved from within by actors who are visible through the horses’ skeletal bamboo frames. Another puppeteer steers the head so that the steeds can nuzzle, roll their eyes, twitch their ears and shiver. When a horse sinks to its knees to die, the puppeteer rolls out of its frame as if he/she was a soul leaving a body